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arXiv · 2507.11592

A critical phase transition in bee movement dynamics can be modeled using a 2D cellular automata

Ivan Shpurov·Tom Froese
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Abstract

The collective behavior of numerous animal species, including insects, exhibits scale-free behavior indicative of the critical (second-order) phase transition. Previous research uncovered such phenomena in the behavior of honeybees, most notably the long-range correlations in space and time. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the bee activity in the hive manifests the hallmarks of the jamming process. We follow up by presenting a discrete model of the system that faithfully replicates some of the key features found in the data - such as the divergence of correlation length and scale-free distribution of jammed clusters. The dependence of the correlation length on the control parameter - density is demonstrated for both the real data and the model. We conclude with a brief discussion on the contribution of the insights provided by the model to our understanding of the insects' collective behavior.

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Ivan Shpurov, Tom Froese. 2025-07-15. A critical phase transition in bee movement dynamics can be modeled using a 2D cellular automata. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11592

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